by Yehuda Koren
She kept herself busy with The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil, a monumental philosophical novel that portrayed the demise of the Austro– Hungarian Empire. With a schoolgirl’s diligence she copied into her diary extracts that appealed to her, like ‘the only ones that never succeed (to conform to the beauty standards of their time!) are born to strange triumphs, those in which the regal and exiled ideal beauty of another age is exposed without compromise.’ Hughes worked with absolute concentration, in wild fever, like a man possessed, completely immune to all noises. ‘He’s almost incapable of performing one word wrong’ she melted with adulation. He was genius, magnificent, ferocious with intelligence and magic, and she was afraid to occupy the space next to him. Awed by his presence and overwhelmed by her perceptions of his magnitude, Assia began – for the first time in her life – to doubt her own worth. ‘I should be pleased that he appears to love me, and love him back – wholly. Make it whole. Please make me whole.’
When Hughes was angry his face turned black and the amorous impact of his eyes disappeared. His blackest, most demonic and destructive moods surfaced when he was suffering from writer’s block. ‘I hated him all night. Couldn’t bear his arm under my head. Pretended it was a wooden bar.’ Gradually, his preoccupation with his writing made her ‘unsatisfied, untalked-out’, alien and hostile. When she challenged him, he exempted himself with ‘I’m dumb’. The expression infuriated her even further: she identified the phrase as coined by Sylvia: ‘means unkind. He means blind, deaf. I am twice as deaf, blasphemously blind.’ Reading Turgenev’s First Love, she was intrigued by a description of a poet and underlined the words ‘a rather cold man like nearly all writers’. In moments of frustration she defined Hughes in her derogatory private code: ‘he IS Lipsey’ – both men were reserved and aloof about their work. Assia could not escape knowing that Dick Lipsey, now a young, brilliant professor, was celebrating a huge success with his textbook An Introduction to Positive Economics that sold millions and made him not just world famous, but also a wealthy man. Another Mrs Lipsey was enjoying Assia’s dreams of grandeur.
Assia and Ted were both busy with the literary work of their absent spouses. He was sending Plath’s poems for publication and editing them into a book, as well as planning a reprint of The Colossus; Assia acted as David’s literary agent and diligently sent his poems to six different publishers. Hughes was reluctant to speak to her about Sylvia but the air was filled with her desirable and greatly missed presence. ‘Sylvia growing in him, enormous, magnificent. I shrinking daily, both nibble at me. They eat me.’ Only in rare moments of intimacy did he allow himself to mention Sylvia openly and casually, and even voice some criticism. ‘Surely by now he remembers nothing but the tenderest, the freshest, the most ever inaccessible again,’ Assia tormented herself. She increasingly doubted the sincerity or permanence of Hughes’s commitment to her. In her view, Sylvia would remain his precious wife, while she was cast for ever in the role of mistress. Her sense of inferiority was intensified by Plath’s giant shadow and her own place at the bottom of Ted’s priorities: ‘at the forefront is Sylvia, and after that, the Grand Scheme, the Genius, the children, and the fixity of the sun, the millions of hawks and fishes and owls, and nightshade that I neither see nor hear.’ A horrifying thought began to creep in: that she was inviting Sylvia’s doom for herself. She confided in her diary:
with the enormous difference that she had a million times the talent, 1,000 times the will, 100 times the greed and passion that I have. I should never have looked into Pandora’s box, and now that I have I am forced to wear her love-widow’s sacking, without any of her compensations. What, in 5 years’ time, will he reproach me for? What sort of woman am I? How much time have I been given? How much time has run out? What have I done with it? Have I used myself to the hilt already? Am I enough for him? AM I ENOUGH FOR HIM?
One morning the post brought John Malcolm Brinnin and Bill Read’s The Modern Poets – an American British Anthology, Hughes leafed through the pages and came across a photograph of Sylvia, which he had never seen before. His mood went sour immediately. It was taken in the USA in 1958 and Sylvia was wearing a floral dress and a dark sweater, her hair in a bang, leaning against a wall. Assia thought that Sylvia looked tense, slightly reproachful, and very young. There was also a similar photo of Ted, laughing and very handsome. It was a cruel juxtaposition of them both: Sylvia, ‘dour, paining, Puritanism bleaking her face … like a young girl after terrible strain, after an illness’, and Ted, ‘innocent of the Boulder in him. He’s aged like weather’.
The following night, Ted dreamt that Sylvia’s hair had turned white and that he shot a cat that they had in Boston but it refused to die. He woke into a wild hysteria lasting all morning, pouring the details all over Assia. His nightmares of that time infiltrated his poetry, describing within two months of her death three ‘dream-meetings’ with Sylvia. Only a few months earlier, when Ted was married to Sylvia, Assia was the one that hit his imagination in stealth, and it now dawned on her: ‘we are in perfect reversal, it’s Sylvia who’s hit it again, and will remain there until he’s middle aged, when she’ll be relieved by a very young girl.’ Hypnotised by both Ted and Sylvia, Assia remarked ironically, ‘maybe I’ll end up writing the biography of Plath.’
Both she and Ted were tied to their former lives in Gordian knots, reliving bonds that they had overlooked when the relationships were intact. The suicide awakened Ted’s allegiance to his discarded marriage vows, and he sent Aurelia Plath lengthy demonstrations of his continuing love for Sylvia. He described his affair with Assia as ‘madness’ and declared that he would never marry another woman. Trapped under Ted’s moody, domineering presence, Assia yearned desperately for David. She longed for the solitary early mornings in Chalcot Square, David lightly asleep, she drinking coffee and eating rolls with red-currant jam, reading, smoking. ‘David. David. Where are you? Why can’t I love you like I used to? My dearest – David. David, yellow boy, straight like cornstalk, smelling of talcum and chocolate, locked with unripe seed. But I did love you more than anyone, ever. I did once, I’ll never forget.’
Her husband’s despondent letters from Spain unsettled her further. She was heartbroken to read that he often went to Barcelona airport on the crazy notion that she might get off the plane. ‘She sent me loving letters, telling me that she misses me terribly and wants me to come back,’ Wevill recalls. Assia broke out in tears, telling her friend Patricia Mendelson that David was the only man she would ever love. ‘I refuse to sink my teeth into T. If I’m not claimed, I can’t claim. Only David can claim me morally,’ she wrote in her diary. She envisaged a rescue plan: ‘I’d move out, buy cigarettes, take a train to London, pack, ring Pickford’s to cart the junk away, and take a train to Spain.’ In an attempt to numb her infatuation with Ted, she persuaded herself: ‘Reality is David, my own income. T is a long night of nightmares. Whatever the consequences for me, T is unconcerned.’ She was quite certain that Ted would make no effort to retrieve her: ‘after I leave him, he’ll move from one woman to woman.’ But as clear-eyed as she was about her prospects, she channelled her grim insights into sulking and not into action, once again entrusting her future to the hands of her men, waiting for either her husband or her lover to make a decisive move.
But David was still inert and resigned himself to composing forlorn love letters and Ted was unable to focus on a single scenario. He was paralysed; so many choices where to live, so many people meddling in his life, so many battles to wage. He and Assia often exploded into bickering quarrels and estrangement and their good days were rare. ‘We’ve lived in peace for five days now, the longest (it seems) stretch since Sylvia died,’ Assia noted on 12 June 1963. During a stay at his parents’ home in Yorkshire, she was on one occasion not quick enough to bathe and dress in time to go shopping with Ted and the children. She sat by the window, livid with bitterness, waiting for his return. She felt that her existence was shrinking into that of a trophy and, at the ag
e of 36, she doubted if she could fill that role. ‘If only I could dress well and carefully every day. I mean, if my function in life is mainly decorative, (but who’s cast me?), then I may as well fulfil it with some brio,’ she sneered at herself. When Ted returned, Assia stormed outside. She saw him following her but continued walking without turning her head. He caught up with her and they walked for a while in a foul silence. The children were hungry and whining, so they returned home. Assia calmed down, and during supper, as she was leaning over the table to give Frieda her food, she and Ted collided in a kiss. ‘I then flared up with enormous love. It’s lasted all day.’
Assia rarely used Hebrew in her diary, and when she did, the right-to-left characters served as a secret code against peeping eyes. On 23 May, she wrote the biblical phrase tohu va’vohu (chaos) – to describe Ted’s constant change of mind in just one day; would he live in London? Keep Court Green or sell it? Would he buy a house near his parents in Yorkshire, or settle in Wiltshire? Cumberland? Lancashire? Sutherland? A city girl and a career woman, she was not keen on moving to the country and being at Ted’s mercy but kept her reservations to her diary: ‘the North terrifies me. Big Boulder smashing me. I feel devoid of substance, of self.’ She was envisioning a cold stone house: ‘hands chapped and red, tired, children chattering like monkeys, Ted locked in a small icy room, coming out three times a day, foraging for food like a bear. Great monumental disregards. We all look unkempt, unkemptable. Patronising visitors come from London. I’m their mother. The thought of ever marrying him utterly repugnant. Let him continue to be her God.’ Nevertheless, she was ready to give it a try and she joined Ted on his house-hunting trips.
Moving to London in 1954, Assia had left her parents and sister in Canada, and since two of her husbands were Canadian, she had neither direct family nor in-laws in England and was free from scrutiny. Like Sylvia, she found it difficult to adjust to the close-knit Yorkshire clan and their Puritan views: Ted’s parents were dismayed by their son’s scandalous relationship with a thrice-married woman; they feared that it had ruined his reputation, making him unsuitable to speak at schools, losing any chance of ever getting a knighthood; ‘and will the Queen ever give me audience,’ he wrote to the Comptons. Staying with his parents, she and Ted were put in separate bedrooms for the sake of decency: Ted, in ‘the snow-flaked room’, and Assia, in Olwyn’s. Bringing coffee to Ted’s bedroom in the morning, Assia could not stop thinking that ‘they probably slept in the room’. She felt unwanted, irritated with the ‘endless idiotic conversations. Or rather rattles, not conversations, but retorts.’ She was appalled by Ted’s crudeness when he idly remarked over the breakfast table, in the presence of the entire family: ‘Have you ever thought, what if you made one quid every time you make love, you’d be very rich by now.’
Hughes was alarmed when Mrs Plath informed him that she was coming to visit her daughter’s grave in June and spend time with her grandchildren. He was worried that she might again try to get hold of Frieda and Nicholas. Since he failed to persuade Mrs Plath to postpone her visit, he tried to minimise the infringement on his privacy and instructed Elizabeth Compton, who was now living in Court Green, to hide photographs and albums and any of Sylvia’s mementoes left behind and tell Mrs Plath that he had taken them. To prevent her visiting Sylvia’s last address in London and bumping into Assia, Ted took the children to his aunt Hilda. He took care to clear off just before Mrs Plath’s arrival in Yorkshire. Before setting off back to London he suddenly disappeared and Olwyn told Assia that he had gone to put flowers on Sylvia’s grave. Assia immediately knew ‘we shall have a properly gloomy journey back to London, with full honours.’
The Hughes family could not spare Aurelia Plath a room in Heptonstall and she had to stay with friends in Halifax, an hour’s bus drive away. Unaware of Assia’s place beside him, she assumed that Ted might give his children to be brought up by his aunt. Although very fond of Hilda, Mrs Plath was appalled by the little mill town so plagued by dampness that it formed acrid and thick smog that stung the eyes. Hilda’s two-bedroom semi-detached stone house in a narrow street was too crowded with large furniture, leaving no room for a child to play.
After a week in Yorkshire, Mrs Plath came down to London and met Hughes. She restated her offer to take the children to the United States, to be raised in her son’s spacious home, which had a large garden by a lake and a swimming beach, with schools that were among the very best in the country. Hughes flatly refused. In her diary, Assia cynically envisaged the dramatic meeting between Ted and Sylvia’s mother – ‘the chief plaintiff’ – she imitated Ted’s grovelling speech to his former mother-in-law: ‘I was vaguely longing, you see, ma’am, loving her all the time, but my sperm was playing havoc with my loins, and my memories, and then it slipped, because I’m dumb, and your beautiful doll, earth-queen, fell and broke all by herself. Snapped in my hand. She did. My beauty and yours. And now we are mourners.’
If not in the United States, Aurelia Plath wished her grandchildren to grow up in her daughter’s Devon nest, away from London’s temptations, but Ted told her that he could not bring himself to live at the site of his ‘crime against her’, against himself. Endless deliberations resulted in a decision to buy Lumb Bank, a spacious manor house in Yorkshire, ‘big enough for the tribe’, the main disadvantage of which was its closeness to his parents’ home. He found a prospective buyer for Court Green, due to move in on 15 August. In the meantime, they stayed with Ted’s parents, and Assia felt ‘caged with six macacos, wearing each other out, and with a noise enough to occupy a whole street’.
Just before the move, she and Ted drove to Court Green to pick up some items. It was her first visit since the fateful weekend that had ignited the affair a year earlier. ‘Assia was stunningly beautiful, and my husband and I were overawed,’ recalls Elizabeth Compton, who was watching over the house. The visit began on the wrong footing, when Elizabeth invited them to share the meal that she made for her four-year-old son James. Assia ate heartily but, with the airs of a white-gloved Kensington lady, blurted out, ‘Oh my God, I haven’t had a meal like that since I was in kindergarten.’ Elizabeth was hurt by the bluntness and ingratitude and hostility increased when Assia turned to Ted and asked to see the house. Ted, silent and detached, made no move. Elizabeth felt that Assia did everything she could to step quickly into Sylvia’s shoes but got up and led the way around a house that Assia already knew, stopping at the various rooms. Outside Sylvia’s study, Assia turned to her and asked, ‘Don’t you feel like a traitor?’ Elizabeth broke down in tears and rushed downstairs, to find Ted rolling a carpet, also weeping.
Left alone on the first floor, Assia delved into ‘the Holy Study’, as she ironically called it, and ‘the God’s bedroom’ – and fetched out Sylvia’s clothes and the drawers that were full of combs and ribbons and brushes and miscellaneous half-discarded things. She felt far from victorious: ‘it was the funeral all over again. DAW [David Anthony Wevill] and mine funeral. And theirs,’ she wrote in her diary. She went down, and, according to Compton, she asked, ‘Do you think Ted and I can be happy together?’ Elizabeth pointed at Ted, worn and shrunken, and said, ‘Look at him. Sylvia’s spirit will always stand between you.’
Fourteen
Torn Between Two Lovers
London, summer 1963–64
Assia’s present for Ted’s thirty-third birthday were the two volumes of the stories of Thomas Mann. Inside, she drew a red arrow above a single, almost white long hair and added the inscription ‘Love is not love until love’s vulnerable’. Those poignant words were a quote from ‘The Dream’, by the American poet Theodore Roethke, who was one of Assia and Ted’s favourites; that same week Roethke made unfortunate headlines when he drowned in a friend’s pool.
At the last moment, just when they were ready to move up north to Lumb Bank, Ted got cold feet and decided that Assia should remain in London until his family cooled off and resigned itself to her. Assia was to live in Sylvia’s flat, which
would be his home during his London visits, and join him for weekends in Yorkshire.
Then all of a sudden, the asking price for Lumb Bank was raised and Hughes failed to get his hoped-for price for Court Green. The financial gap forced him to give up Yorkshire and move back to Devon. It freed him from the scrutiny of his family but, for some reason, Assia did not follow him. It could not have been her aversion to the haunting presence of Plath; in fact, she stayed on in 23 Fitzroy Road, living on her own in the death flat, surrounded by Plath’s belongings. Apparently, after six hard-pressed years with Plath and six tense months with Assia, Hughes wanted some time for himself. It looked like a temporary delay but two and a half turbulent years would pass before they would live again together under the same roof.
Assia had no choice but to comply. Alone in the maisonette, she picked up Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving and, beneath the inscription ‘Sylvia Plath, Court Green, 9 November 1962’ she added her own stamp of ownership and wrote ‘Sept. 63’. She read the book, with Plath’s many annotations, and added her own, especially underlining passages on page 97. The paragraph deals with the wish of an adult to be sucked back into the ‘all-receiving – and all-destroying – womb’ which Fromm diagnosed as a severe mental disturbance. Some mothers, Fromm wrote, ‘want to keep the child, the adolescent, the man, with them; he should not be able to breathe, but through them; not able to love, except on a superficial sexual level – degrading all other women.’ Was Assia thinking of Edith Hughes as the cause of Ted’s sudden reluctance to include her in his life?